New Brews

New skins up in the sidebar...

[UPDATE:Check out Firecracker Weird!]

First is Firecracker. I started this one as a tribute/rip-off of Wizbang. I wanted to put the big firecracker explosion over on the right hand side at the top of the links. It looked pretty crappy so I used the image as a background for the date and sidetitle divs. Then I used a 1px outline to make it pop off the black background a little better. I re-worked my banner image to stretch all the way across the page up to 1290px wide. I aligned the image right top, no-repeat and it looks great. It would look better, I think, with a text banner instead of my banner images, but they still look ok for a skin.

Next is Purple Fog. I found this really cool image for trees and fog shot through a purple filter. It's a pretty large image so I aligned it right bottom and fixed. Then, I grabbed a color off the background, ran it through my disgronifier and got 10 shades to work with. I used a combination of the color scheme to make the date and sidetitle divs look like raised buttons. I used white backgrounds and opacity settings of .60 for the blogbody and side divs so you could see the page background image through the posts and links. The date and sidetitle divs I set as full opacity so it gives a better visual clue to the page divisions. The only thing about opacity settings I don't like, is that I haven't figured out how to make the embedded images 100%... yet.

I designed these skins for full screen viewing at 1280x1024. Both designs degrade gracefully down to 800x600. I haven't checked then in IE yet as IE sucks and is not CSS standards compliant. They both look great in Mozilla 1.6 though.

I've got another design over at the MadLab for MuNuviana that has a white background. I popped that baby into a black background and... It.Is.Tough!!!

If they don't like it at MuNu, I'll bring it over here as a skin along with the white one.